Alec

“Gods, what an easy life the Guild-beggars have," the other niche-guard observed to his mate. "What slack discipline and low standards of skill! Perfect, my sacred butt! You'd think a child could see through those disguises."
"Doubtless some children do," his mate retorted. "But their dear mothers and fathers only drop a tear and a coin or give a kick. Grown folk go blind, lost in their toil and dreams, unless they have a profession such as thieving which keeps them mindful of things as they really are.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

“At this point in the story, a child interrupted from the crowd, asking fearfully and loudly if the gods were terrible to behold.
The storytellers smiled, and bowed to the philosophers. One of these, a venerable elderly man, spoke gravely to the child. “No, indeed. The gods are beautiful, and just. Those who reverence and obey them need fear nothing from the gods. The gods reward those who adhere to them. Those who stray, they punish. Then they are terrible, terrible in their perfection and magnificence.”
“But,” said the child anxiously, “what do they look like?” The philosopher was done, however, and the storytellers proceeded with their tale. “Hush!” said the child’s nurse sharply. “But,” said the child, “if I cannot tell them from their looks, how am I to know them and beware of offending them?”
Then a voice spoke to the child, a voice which brushed the insides of the child’s ears, wonderfully unexpected, like the sound of the sea inside a shell. “The gods are colorless as crystal for they have no blood in their veins. Neither do they possess breasts or genitals. Their eyes are cold as their country where everything is tinted by frost. But you will probably never meet them; they have no liking for the world.”
“Oh,” said the child, and looked up and saw the pale face of a man bending over it, a face so astonishing it dazzled the eyes of the child like the moon. Then the child, dazzled, blinked, and in the little interval of that blink, the man was gone.”
― Tanith Lee, Night's Master

“For other men --- men who are part of something, who follow a chief they believe in, or ways they were reared in from birth --- they can keep their eyes from seeing what they have not been taught to see, and do not want to see. But too late was I brought to my father’s house. I tried to be part of it, but I never could.”
― Evangeline Walton, The Cross and the Sword

“Nothing like changing your illusions,” she said, “or you grow tired. London’s a fine place but one wants to see the elfin mountains sometimes.”

“Then you know London?” I said.

“Of course I do,” she said. “I can dream as well as you. You are not the only person that can imagine London.” Men were toiling dreadfully in her garden; it was in the heat of the day and they were digging with spades; she suddenly turned from me to beat one of them over the back with a long black stick that she carried. “Even my poets go to London sometimes,” she said to me.

“Why did you beat that man?” I said.

“To make him work,” she answered.

“But he is tired,” I said.

“Of course he is,” said she.

And I looked and saw that the earth was difficult and dry and that every spadeful that the tired men lifted was full of pearls; but some men sat quite still and watched the butterflies that flitted about the garden and the old witch did not beat them with her stick. And when I asked her who the diggers were she said, “These are my poets, they are digging for pearls.” And when I asked her what so many pearls were for she said to me: “To feed the pigs of course.”

“But do the pigs like pearls?” I said to her.

“Of course they don’t,” she said.”
― Lord Dunsany, Tales of Three Hemispheres